My November poultry newsletter tells you how to sell eggs to grocery stores, how to keep mud at bay during the wet season, and more!

There's a stage in every company's development when the smart people leave and the company runs on autopilot from then on, in a zombie-like half-life. It happened to Hewlett-Packard when Dr. Hewlett and Dr. Packard passed on; it happened to Apple when Steve Jobs left the first time, and it happened to eBay and PayPal ages ago (as anyone who has ever tried to find an actual human being to help them with a problem knows to their sorrow).

Now I'm wondering if it's happening to Google. Their "new look" for Gmail is a train wreck. Where did all the emphasis on tiny, faint gray text come from? Is everyone over thirty supposed to find a new mail provider right now?

Some mail threads are extended by adding comments to the top of the existing material, so there needs to be a "Reply" button at the top of the message as well as the bottom. Where did it go?

I've found no advantage in the new look, and, so far, I've heard of no one else who does so, either? So why is Google riling us all up by telling us that the old look will soon go away forever? It's not as if they don't have hundreds of thousands of servers! They can keep the old version, the one their smart people designed before they all left, as a sort of shrine to the company they used to be.

My 17-year-old autistic son Karl was hospitalized with Type 1 diabetes in July, and I've started a blog about what we're doing about it.

Karen and I are both engineers and are relentless about doing our research, so this ought to be worth following if you or a loved one are diabetic, and especially if it's a diabetic child or someone in the autistic spectrum.

We'll be talking about how we adjust Karl's diet -- in spite of his very strong food preferences -- and monitor and manage his insulin. We are adjusting his dosage ourselves to keep things under better control than if we waited for a regular doctor's visit.

So take a look at Karl's Diabetes Blog.

Winter is right around the corner, and what does this mean for your chickens?

For me, in the mild Pacific Nortwest climate, only 40 miles from the ocean, winter is not that big a deal, all things considered. The waterers freeze sometimes, and we get snow once or twice a year, but weather that actually bothers the hens? Doesn't happen.

The rule of thumb is that chickens that can keep dry will keep producing and be in fine health so long as the daytime highs are mostly above freezing, and will stay healthy down to twenty below if they can stay dry and out of the wind. In both cases, of course, they need plenty of feed to keep warm. So for many of us, winter is not an "OMG!" moment, just another thing to deal with.

I've written a Winter Chicken Care FAQ page.

I've also written a page on keeping your chickens' water from freezing, which for me is the biggest wintertime nuisance.

The needs of winter housing are different from the summer, though probably not as different as you think! I've republished Dr. Woods' Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, and if you follow the link you can read the sample chapter to realize that this is an intriguing book! (and one of my perennial best-sellers).

This winter I won't be using lights on my hens, who I think are too exposed to the weather to benefit from them. I think lights are a good idea for most flocks if you need more winter eggs. And a lot of chicken coops are awfully dark in the winter without them!

It's harvest season, so gardeners have more produce and garden waste than they know what to do with. A few neighbors see my flock of chickens as a handy way to ensure that nothing goes to waste, without having to actually eat over-ripe or oversized produce.

Feeding scraps to your chickens isn't rocket science, and there are only a few rules:

• Don't feed anything rotten to the chickens. Chickens will usually turn up their beaks at anything unwholesome, but let's not take many chances. Mushy apples are okay, and a mold spot here and there will just be avoided by them. Don't feed them anything that smells funny!
• Don't take away their chicken feed. You get into trouble when feeding surplus and scraps and waste to chickens by trying to force them to eat it. Chickens like variety and like unprocessed food, and they have a pretty good "nutritional appetite," so they'll eat at least as much of anything new as they should. If you keep their chicken feed available, you won't poison or malnourish them with ill-considered offerings.
• Remove anything that attracts flies and rats. When feeding things that will attract unwanted visitors, don't offer the chickens more than they will eat in a short time. Since you often don't know how much this will be, be prepared to take away the leftovers soon after feeding.
• Slice or break open things with thick skins, like squashes. Chickens can't handle the rind but love what's inside.
• Be aware that most waste and scraps have few calories. Vegetables and garbage, for example, usually have very few calories per pound. Vitamins, yes; calories, no. Calories are concentrated mostly in grains and fats, which usually aren't what people are pressing on you.
• If you have a lot more scraps than your chickens can handle, consider pigs. Pigs are better than chickens at dealing with agricultural surplus, if only because they eat so much more!

Want to learn more about feeding your chickens?
And I have more blog and web site articles about chicken feed!

But what you really need, if you want to sink your teeth into the topic, is a copy of Heuser's Feeding Poultry. I republished this book because there wasn't anything good and accessible in print. In addition to discussing everything you can imagine, it covers topics like green feed and feeding scraps.

People often ask me if chickens on free range need to be fed, or can they get what they need by foraging? And if they do need feeding, what kind of feed to they need? Just grain, or what?

In the old days, when people in town threw their garbage into the street and those in the country threw it out the back door, chickens and pigs ran around taking cleaning this up for you, and this kind of feeding would support some number of creatures, which would in time grow up and provide you with eggs or meat. On farms, the horses and cows would be spilling some of their grain, too, and other kinds of wastage would contribute to the chickens' diet.

Add some corn to their diet, and you get better results. This is pretty much how things stood on the average farm in 1900, where Milo Hastings reported that the average laying hen produced 83 eggs a year -- most of them in the spring. The hens would go broody and produce a batch of chicks, which under the circumstances would grow very slowly. If you were lucky, the cockerels would reach market weight 4-6 months later and the pullets would start laying in November, because if they weren't laying then they wouldn't start until spring.

Because the amount of feed you can find by foraging in the wintertime is slim to none, people sold all their non-essential chickens before Christmas and overwintered as few as possible. These carefully selected few still produced virtually nothing until spring because they were malnourished. On farms where grain was fed liberally, the chickens were merely vitamin- and protein-deficient, while on farms where chickens had to fend for themselves, they were starved for calories as well.

That's the old-fashioned way, the "natural" way. Yuck! So how can we make things a little more unnatural and a whole lot better?

This is where "balanced chicken feed" comes in. All the nutrients the chicken needs in one convenient package. When the concept was first introduced, nutritional science was in its infancy, so a "balanced diet" was missing some important elements. Vitamins hadn't been discovered yet, proteins weren't very well understood, and mineral requirements involved some hand-waving. And yet the concept of "Keep a trough full of balanced chicken feed in front of the chickens at all times" was a great success, and could almost double the production of the average flock, with most of the increase being in the fall and winter -- the time of high prices.

By trial and error, people figured out that "steamed beef scrap" gave good results, though they didn't know way. As it turns out, steamed beef scrap contained not only meat (which has all the protein and most of the vitamins a chicken needs), but significant amounts of bone meal as well, and this provided all the minerals for which the requirements were unknown. Add grain to this, and you have a balanced diet, right?

Well, not quite. Some of the vitamins were under-represented, and Vitamin D was entirely missing. Green feed takes care of all of this except for the Vitamin D, which chickens synthesize via UV light, just like humans, so if you give the chickens lots of green feed year-round and you get them to spend a lot of time outdoors, then you have a balanced diet!

Later, all the nutrients were figured out, and now chickens can be raised easily in total confinement, with only scientifically formulated chicken feed to eat. The nutritional requirements of chickens are better understood than those of any other creature, including humans.

(Sadly, the industry aims for least-cost feed formulation rather than maximum quality, so the diets fed to broilers and laying hens keep them productive, but the eggs and meat have far less nutritional value than they could. That's one reason why pastured eggs and poultry test so well nutritionally -- green plants are loaded with nutrients that allow the chicken and eggs to be much higher in vitamins and Omega-3 and lower in saturated fat.)

Over the years, every different method of feeding chickens was tested over and over, and the most consistent result was that if you kept a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed in front of the chickens at all times, you made a lot more money. That is true of every management system and every feeding system, across the board.

Supplemental feed like grain or scraps or garden waste is okay, and the chickens will eat a lot of it if it's palatable and less if it's not, but never take away the balanced chicken feed to try to force them to eat more of something than they want, because that's the surest way to lower productivity and profits.

Want to learn more about feeding chickens? Then you need to read Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser, which I reprinted because it's the most thorough and accessible book on the topic.

After many years out of print, I'm proud to reissue Ruth Stout's organic gardening classic: Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy, and the Indolent."

I've been a fan of Ruth's since I was ten years old, when her column was the first thing I read in each new issue of Organic Gardening magazine. Practical, funny, and irreverent, her books are even more compelling than her columns.

Gardening Without Work" introduced the "permanent mulch" system of gardening, which replaces weeding and plowing with a thick mulch of straw or whatever else is available. The mulch conserves water, smothers weeds, prevents erosion, and fertilizes the soil. Perhaps it was the inspiration for modern "no-till" farming? I don't know. Although
Ruth died thirty years ago, her writing has legions of fans, and you'll see why
when you read it!

You can order Gardening Without Work" from any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. As I write this, Amazon.com is claiming that it's out of stock and they don't know when they'll get more, but in reality they always seem to ship within a week when they say this about my books, so don't let their conservatism put you off!

The end of the school year is upon us, the weather is nice and we're seeing more people at the two Corvallis Farmers' Markets, (Wed. and Sat., 9-11). Get your grass-fed chicken and eggs there, along with all the other fine produce of our local area!

For more information see the Markets' Web page at LocallyGrown.org

My employer, Citrix Systems, sent me the plaques for the patents that I helped develop for them. Woo-hoo! Ten patents about different kinds of network acceleration, which is what my day job is about.

The Corvallis Indoor Winter Market started a new season yesterday, with plenty of happy customers and vendors. We were there with grass-fed chicken and eggs, and a lot of other local farms were there, too, selling meat, cool-season vegetables, nuts, honey, baked goods, craft items — you name it. This is good stuff: you should see how much stuff the vendors buy from each other, and we're in the know!

If you're in the Corvallis area, why not treat yourself to a Saturday breakfast or lunch out and combine it with a trip to the Indoor Market? Come on — you deserve it!

The Indoor Market runs from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM at Guerber Hall at the Benton County Fairgrounds. See you there!